Bulk-Titanium Waveguide – a New Building Block for Microwave Planar Circuits

Authors:

X.T. Huang, S. Todd, C. Ding, N.C. MacDonald

Affilation:

University of California at Santa Barbara, US

Pages:

513 - 516

Keywords:

titanium, MEMS, waveguide, RF MEMS

Abstract:

We present a new topology for planar microwave transmission line: bulk titanium waveguide. The waveguide is formed by deep trench etching, dielectric gap filling, and planarization. The high aspect ratio of the resulting structure provide superior field confinement, low crosstalk, therefore a small footprint. We have successfully demonstrated waveguides with propagation loss of 0.7dB/mm at 40GHz. To enable bulk titanium as a substrate compatible with microfabrication, we developed a suite of techniques that overcome unique manufacturing issues associated with titanium.